Contemporary Quote by Greil Marcus

I've never set out consciously to write American music. I don't know what that would be unless the obvious Appalachian folk references.

— Carlisle Floyd

A lot of Appalachian music has a certain haunted, foggy feel to it; a certain sinister quality. And that transcends who is singing it.…

— Bradford Cox

“Where the deepest word ends, there music begins with its supersensuous and all-confounding intimations.”

— Herman Melville

“We speak in (rich) monotones. Our poetry is haunted by the music it has left behind. Orpheus shrinks to a poet when he looks…

— George Steiner

In Nashville, there is a historic tendency to work the lyric to death while settling for music that works. In pop or rock, it…

— Michael Kosser

Look at Allen Ginsberg. In poems like 'Kaddish' and 'Howl,' you can hear a cantor between the lines. It's fully alive, and I think…

— Derek Walcott

“ If the sweet lilt of a soft Southern accent isn’t music to the ears, we just don’t know what is. Music isn’t just…

— Deborah Ford

I love the sound of words, the feel of them, the flow of them. I love the challenge of finding just that perfect combination…

— Lauren Willig

Poetry is a dance music measuring buck-and-wing follies along with the gravest and stateliest dead-marches.

— Carl Sandburg

“We sing lyrical excess, exacerbated expressionism, imponed objectivity, inventiveness, meta-baroque, extravaganza, super metaphor, sublimity, strident, exposure, super-pone, noise, super-objectivity, zillionism, fragmentation and aesthetics of…

— Lepota L. Cosmo

“music can reach those places where words alone can’t go.”

— Arianna Huffington

“Musical myths speak with authority about our society, its fragility, its strengths, its desires, and its limits. Music becomes a wise version of the…

— Edward Rothstein